Job Types on Fram

Fram is designed to run medium-sized parallel jobs. If you need to
run serial jobs or "narrow" parallel jobs, Saga is a better choice.

Most jobs on Fram are normal jobs.

For a preprocessing or postprocessing job which only needs one node,
use a preproc job. If it only needs a single cpu, a small bigmem
job can be used instead.

Jobs requiring a lot of memory (> 4 GiB/cpu) should run as bigmem
jobs.

Jobs that are very short, or implement checkpointing, can run as
optimist jobs, which means they can use resources that are idle for
a short time before they are requeued by a non-optimist job.

For development or testing, there are two job types: devel usually
has the shortest wait time during office hours, but is limited to
small, short jobs. short allows slightly larger and longer jobs,
but will probably have longer wait times.

Here is a more detailed description of the different job types on
Fram:

This is the default job type. Most jobs are normal jobs. Most of
the other job types are "variants" of a normal job.

In normal jobs, the queue system hands out complete nodes. If a
project needs more than 32 nodes per job, and the application in
question can actually scale more than 32 nodes, please send a request
to support@metacenter.no.

Preproc

preproc jobs are meant for small preprocessing or postprocessing
tasks. Typically, such jobs don't use many cpus, so requiring them to
use 4 nodes would be wasting resources. If the job is
single-threaded, one can use a bigmem job instead, asking for 1 cpu.

The optimist job type is meant for very short jobs, or jobs with
checkpointing (i.e., they save state regularly, so they can restart
from where they left off).

Optimist jobs get lower priority than other jobs, but will start as
soon as there are free resources for at least 30 minutes. However,
when any other non-optimist job needs its resources, the optimist
job is stopped and put back on the job queue. This can happen before
the optimist job has run 30 minutes, so there is no guaranteed
minimum run time.

Therefore, all optimist jobs must use checkpointing, and access to
run optimist jobs will only be given to projects that demonstrate
that they can use checkpointing. If you want to run optimist jobs,
send a request to support@metacenter.no.

Devel

Allocation units: whole nodes

Job Limits:

minimum 1 nodes, maximum 4 nodes per job

maximum 4 nodes in use at the same time

Maximum walltime: 30 minutes

Priority: high

Available resources: 4 nodes with 32 cpus and 60 GiB RAM between
07:00 and 21:00 on weekdays

This is meant for small, short development or test jobs. Devel jobs
have access to a set of dedicated nodes on daytime in weekdays to
make the jobs start as soon as possible. On the other hand, there are
limits on the size and number of devel jobs.

If you have temporary development needs that cannot be fulfilled by
the devel or short job types, please contact us at
support@metacenter.no.

This is also meant for development or test jobs. It allows slightly
longer and wider jobs than devel, but has slightly lower priority,
and no dedicated resources. This usually results in a longer wait
time than devel jobs, at least on work days.